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Multimedia Fusion 2 was designed for a professional use, with a 1024x768
display in mind. While there is an upward trend to higher resolutions
there are still a large number of people who use 800x600 resolution. This
article presents some tricks you can use to use Fusion comfortably in
such a resolution.
Free some space in the display.
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first thing to do, is to free some space for us to work.. First
of all, make sure that your Windows XP task bar is hidden : right
click onthe Start Button and select Properties,
change to the toolbar tab check Always on top and
Auto hide.
Click on OK
: the toolbar should vanish and reappear automatically when your
drag your mouse pointer over it : it is still very handy to use
but does not use any space in your display. |
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We
can also hide MMF status bar : while useful it is not required.
Open the View
menu, and uncheck the Status Bar option.
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If you
want, you can also free a lot of space on the display by reducing the
size of the window title bar and reducing the size of the font used to
display the menus.
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Right
click somewhere on your desktop, and choose the Properties
option.
Click on the appearance tab and choose Advanced.
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Select
Caption button in the Item combo
box, and change the size of the icons to 10. Choose Active
title bar and select the Small font font,
untick the Bold icon, choose a size of 6 (or seven
if it is too small for you). Now you can resize the bar by entering
a height of 14. Now choose Menus in the combo
box, select the small font, and a size of 6. Reduce the height of
the menu bar.
Click on OK to validate your changes. |
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These
3 simple manipulation made at least 64 pixels of free space for you to
work! Now lets's see how we can customize MMF2 itself.
Free some space in Fusion interface.
One
of the most difficult challenge for us when we were creating MMF2 was
the number of different editors and how we had to deal with the toolbars.
MMF2 is a product that contains many different embeded editors : storyboard,
frame, event, event-list, animation, picture, expression editor, as
well as multiple toolbars.
More about Toolbars.
| Multimedia
Fusion 2 uses several several toolbars that have various functions.
Two of these are more universal, these being the Workspace (which
shows the different application frames) and the Properties where we
will be making changes to almost anything added to the application
or the application itself. Uncheck all others and open them as needed. |
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Now
we can work will dock the open Toolbars on the right side of the screen
by simply dragging the Toolbar to the right where is will automatically
change shape. Then let go of the Toolbar and it will snap into place.
Once both are positioned they will appear to be stacked. Your screen
will look something like this:
The
Toolbars are not only moveable and dockable, as we have just seen, but
there are also scaleable. By moving the mouse over the right edge of
one of these tool bars you will see the mouse pointer change to the
horizontal pointer and will look something like this: You
can now click and drag the size of the docked Toolbars to open up more
room on the right side of the screen. (the Frame area). You can also
resize the area in the middle of the screen that displays the object
that have been added. this can be reduced to zero width by dragging
the right edge all the way to the left. Don't worry, this can be reset
very easily.
We
have to work on the other toolbars but we can also customize them as
well. To remove an icon, press ALT, click on the icon and drag it anywhere
on the display (in the middle of the frame for example). To add an icon
to a toolbar, just drag it from another toolbar inside of the destination
toolbar with the ALT key down.
Of
course, if you feel that you need more or less icons, just drag
& drop the ones you want : the key is to have the best options in
the smallest toolbar. Personnally, I left the most, if not all, of the
Toolbars the way they are and simply open and close them as needed.
Once you know the corrisponding shortcut keys to the individual functions
you will open them less ofton and your work will flow more efficiently.
The storyboard Window.
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Well,
we do not need it : the Workspace window displays all the necessary
information for us to browse through the application.
To
get rid of it for good, open the Tools menu, Preference box , click
on the Storyboard tab, and untick the option Show
storyboard. You can always open this from the View menu
if needed. |
The frame editor
The display is crammed by the portion of the window that display the
icons of the objects used in the frame. This portion of the window can
be resized and centered, just to show the usefull information.
Even with that done, we do not see the whole frame area, which makes
development very problematic. The solution is to use the zoom option
found in the View menu / Zoom, and set the display by 50% : you will
see the whole frame and its border very easily on the display. We now
find ourselves with a displays that shows all the necessary informations
and we can work a lot better. It looks something like this :
Note:
the frame editor zoom settings are not saved when quitting MMF.
The event editor.
Easy!
Use the zoom tool to increase the number of events displayed at the
same time. The zoom settings you set this way will be lost next time
you boot MMF. To get the same percentage of zoom each time you use MMF,
open the preference dialog, click on the Event Editor
tab and drag the zoom slider to the desired value.
You
can also reduce further the size of the icons and get more icons displayed
with the same amount of events (usually, the event editor gets frustrating
to use with too many objects) by dragging the horizontal separation
under the objects a bit up.
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